20080530

I recently switched to my RTL-8139 NIC instead of default onboard Intel NIC, after I came to know that e100 uses binary blobs. I’ve a Netgear WGT624 WiFi router (acting as switch, atm). I plug-in my desktop at a 100 Mbps switch port in the switch. So now when I connected my RTL8139 NIC to my wireless enabled wired-switch, it comes online at 10 Mbps (full-duplex)

How to arrive at the number 0x231, check out modinfo 8139too and drivers/net/8139too.c source code. BtW, I just noticed that rl0 has auto-negotiation off, so I decided to turn it on, and following are the results:

After this I tried testing network speed using iperf, and got speeds of ~ 67 Mbps. With e100, I used to get ~ 97 Mbps. Anyways this is an 3-4 year old NIC, plugged (and unused) into my desktop unused since 2-3 years. So will try testing speeds with a new NIC soon.